National treasure.

Anna Deveare Smith is a playwright, professor and one of the most extraordinary actresses you will ever see.

She is a pioneer of documentary theatre and became widely known for her one-person shows in which she used material from countless interviews to construct a script and embody the people interviewed.  Her best known pieces using this technique are Fires in the Mirror about the Crown Heights Riot of 1991 and Twilight: Los Angeles about the 1992 L.A. riots.  If you get a chance to see them, do!

She is now known to a wider public due to her recurring roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing and as the hospital administrator on Nurse Jackie.

Her ability to fully embody, physically and vocally, the people she has interviewed has been rightfully described as chameleon-like.  It’s truly amazing.

I’m really excited about an interview she recently gave to The Boston Globe in which she talks about writing a fictional play for the first time.  I can’t wait to see what that turns out to be.

Go take a look at the complete interview, of course, but here’s a little bit that caught my attention and explains a lot about Ms. Smith’s work:

The thing that speaks to me the most is the idea that a child understands, an early, primal idea, which is: That’s not fair. When somebody tells me something in the course of the interview that’s not fair, I become very interested because I know what’s going to happen linguistically is that as they tell me about a moment or something that shattered their sense of who they were, they will then have to go to their most rich resources to make the world right again, in front of me. And that’s when I start working.

It sure is good work.

Take a look at this TED Talk and see for yourself.